Discover Why Video Is THE Medium For Social Media and Why YOUR Business Needs to be Using it Right Now

Over the last few years we have seen tremendous growth in video marketing. Equipment prices have dropped, creative tools have improved, and video has been integrated into just about every single platform where you might want to reach your audience.

In fact if you have kept up to date with trends in social media, you’ll probably be aware that video content is quickly taking over most other forms of content.

Your customers are seeing video all of the time, and are using it themselves. On their personal pages, Facebook users are now updating their Timelines with Live videos instead of writing about what they are doing or taking photos.

This is allowing friends and family to experience the moment along with the person who is recording the live video, and it is all done in real time.

Not only has this enhanced the social media experience for personal users, it has also become a hugely effective new tool for business users. Similarly, Instagram’s relatively new video feature has been a huge hit with both business and personal users.

Although Instagram’s video time limit is a matter of minutes, these short videos can have a dramatic effect when done right.

Snapchat, which began as a photo-sharing app that was popular with teenagers, has now become a hugely powerful marketing platform with hundreds of businesses sharing images and videos with other Snapchat users.

Last, and by no means least, every social media site is able to share YouTube videos, making YouTube still the best platform for uploading your videos to the web.

Effective Social Media Strategies For Your Business
Any good business owner or online marketer knows that in order to be successful with a social media account in business, it’s vital to have the right strategies in place in order to gain attention from the maximum amounts of people at the right times.

When it comes to social media marketing using video content, it is vital to have good marketing strategies in place in order to ensure that you get the best results. For example, the timing of your videos is vital to getting a good response.

Some of the best times to post videos on your social media pages are during lunchtime and in the evenings, when most people are not working and are more likely to be relaxing and catching up on social media.

Similarly, the weekends are also a good time to increase your video sharing activity. However, bear in mind that timing could vary depending on your specific target audience, so it’s essential to make sure that you carry out the necessary market research before putting this strategy in place. For example, if you’re targeting students, you may get a better response by posting late at night or in the mid- morning.

On the other hand, businesses targeting people who work in typical 9-5 jobs are best sticking to evenings and weekends when it comes to updating their social media pages with fresh new video content.

How to Generate Interest On Social Media
In order to generate interest in your video content on social media, it’s important to make sure that you use other forms of content to grab the attention of your followers.

Whilst some social media sites, such as Instagram, may play your video content automatically, others, such as Facebook, may require the user to actively press the play button in order to view the video. In this case, using written content to create an interesting and attention- grabbing description of the video will encourage more users to press play.

When it comes to writing good video descriptions on social media, it’s important to remember to keep things short and to the point – anything too long could end up boring the reader, and they might not bother to watch the video after reading.

A good way to create interesting and compelling video descriptions is to leave the reader wondering. For example, a simple ‘Can you guess what happened when we went here?’ will leave the user wanting to find out more, which will encourage them to take the time to watch the video.

Growing Your Social Media Presence Through Video
Video is one of the best types of content when it comes to increasing your social media presence and gaining more followers.

Because video is available on the main social media networks – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, it is easy for businesses to upload their videos to YouTube and share them on the various social media platforms in order to reach a broader audience.

We have already seen the power of social media and video combined – more and more people are rising to Internet fame through short, humorous, or informative videos on social media than ever before.

Businesses such as make-up and cosmetics stores and artists are using social media to grow their businesses through short, tutorial videos, and similarly, food bloggers are utilising video to its full extent by creating short, catchy recipe videos which are extremely popular.

The key to using video to grow your business’ presence on social media is to create content which is shareable, along with actively asking your followers to share it.

When creating video content, it’s a good idea to study your target audience and find out the things that they enjoy sharing with their personal social media followers. When you create content that your direct followers love to share, you will expose it to a much wider audience.

* Using Video to Connect With Your Social Media Followers
* Using video to connect with your social media followers is something that is becoming more and more popular for businesses and has a range of great benefits.

As mentioned earlier, social media and the online shopping boom means that customer service is now something which is expected 24/7. Customers expect to be kept up to date with their favourite brands through social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat.

Facebook Live Video: One of the best ways to keep your customers up to date using social media and video is Facebook’s Live Video feature. Not only does Facebook now allow you to keep your customers up to date in real time when you’re doing something special such as attending a big industry event, taking part in charity fundraising, or unveiling a big new product, it also allows you to communicate directly with your customers, for example through live question and answer sessions.

When you stream a live video on Facebook, you can see the comments being left on it in real time. This means that you can ask your followers to leave any questions in the comments, where you can read them and answer straight away as the asker watches. This can be a great tool to use when it comes to finding out what it is that customers want to know about your business, or what they would like to see in the way of changes and adjustments.

Snapchat: Snapchat was once exclusively for teens and young people, but today, more and more businesses understand the power of this app when it comes to connecting with customers.

With more and more people of all ages signing up to Snapchat every day, having a brand Snapchat account can be a great way to communicate with your customers and get more exposure for your brand.

Although Snapchat videos only last a matter of seconds, short, to-the-point videos can be hugely effective, or you can use a sequence of short videos to tell a story or share what you are currently doing with your followers.

Ignoring Video Will Hurt Your Profits
Now is the perfect time to start using video in your online promotions. More and more businesses are realising this and getting on board, including your competition. You really can’t afford to ignore video marketing. It is here to stay and your customers expect it.

As a busy business owner, this may all sound very daunting and time-consuming. The good news is that you don’t have to figure it all out yourself. We can help, just as we have done with many more businesses just like yours. Contact us today to discover how we can significantly increase the profits of your business.

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